31 (or so) Days of Terror: Hardware

The other night I had the pleasure of watching an excellent documentary on Netflix about the infamous 1996 Island of Dr. Moreau film and the incredibly troubled production that spawned it. It was called Lost Soul and its central figure was Moreau's original director Richard Stanley. Stanley is an odd guy, one of those visionary British creatives with a lot of esoteric interests. Ok, he's South African but the point stands. Stanley became fascinating to me, especially since he's only made a few shorts since the Moreau debacle, so I was curious about his earlier work that was only briefly mentioned in the doc. Which brings us to his first film that unsurprisingly put him on the map, Hardware. And guys, it's the real deal.

The setup is pretty basic for horror sci-fi. Inspired by a 2000AD comic strip, Dylan McDermott is a post-apocalyptic scavenger scrounging the radioactive wasteland for anything of value. He stumbles across the head of a robot and brings it back to his girlfriend Jill (Stacey Travis) in a crumbling cyberpunk city. Jill is an artist, welding bits of metal into avant-garde sculptures, and incorporates the robot head into her latest piece. Unfortunately, the robot isn't dead. In fact it's a deadly new weapons droid capable of repairing itself from whatever's handy. You see where this is going. The robot repairs itself and proceeds to go on a rampage, menacing Jill and brutally murdering her neighbors. Like I said, pretty standard. But it's in Stanley's execution that Hardware comes alive and becomes fiercely original.

The killer robot springs to life.

This is immediately apparent by the production design and the cinematography. Stanley and his designers build a wonderfully realized cyberpunk dystopia, bringing the heavy industrial aesthetic covered in garbage from 2000AD to life. Some of it is familiar, the whole look is very 90s cyberpunk but with a layer of sand over, but if you've ever wondered what the city from Blade Runner looked like during the day here's your answer. That familiarity is abated by the film's use of color and sound. Stanley soaks the frames in garish primary colors; deep reds, blazing oranges, and acidic greens, contrasted by impenetrable shadows. Combined with the hectic, music-video style editing and out of left field camera moves like zooms and slo-mo gives it Hardware a hallucinatory quality. Imagine watching The Terminator on bad acid.

All that visual eccentricity wouldn't mean anything though if it didn't support the story and it's here that Stanley really shows off his talent. It is clear that Stanley has more on his mind and he uses the skeleton of a generic killer robot movie to make a reasonably thoughtful piece of science fiction. From the very beginning, the film establishes a theme of the conflict between humanity and technology and humanity losing. Jill makes this explicit early on when she says of her sculptures, that she's been trying to give them more organic quality but in the process the metal keeps taking over. The themes go further though, as children and birth are subtle concerns of the plot. It's a major background element that the government is instituting a sterilization plan and it's hinted that the killer droid is a prototype for how to carry it out. Stanley seems to be saying that in the wake of the apocalypse, humanity will become disconnected with the technology that caused it and feel an emptiness. So they'll try to fill it with something; with religion, with art, with the pointless quest in the wasteland, but it's obvious in the film that it doesn't matter. Humanity will be replaced by the very machines it's become so disconnected from. We lost our humanity, so now something without humanity will take its place.

Stanley's blood red wasteland and the nomad who
discovers his robot.

Even putting aside the film's mostly successful attempts at depth, it also works on the surface level of a damn good killer robot movie. Stanley understands the basic horror notion of never showing all of your monster and keeping it hidden for most of the film, but he also maintains the tension by using creepy POV shots from the robot. Smartly, he also keeps the action contained to Jill's half-broken high-tech apartment giving the film a very contained atmosphere. Hardware is one of the best films I've ever seen to use the "trapped in a room with the monster" gimmick and so successfully get it to feature length. Some of the robot's actions defy believability and more than once I found myself wondering exactly how big it was supposed to be, but these moments are rare.

Despite how well it handles all these other aspects, Hardware is held back by several missteps. First and most glaringly is Dylan McDermott's character. For the guy who gets top billing, his character is kind of pointless. I understand his plot function of delivering the robot's head to Jill, but after that he mostly vanishes for a while. He only returns at the end to sacrifice himself and give Jill the robot's weakness. McDermott doesn't even give a terribly bad performance, but his character doesn't feel necessary to the film overall. It's Jill's story really. In fact, most of the film's problems can be traced back to him. His death at the end leads into a bizarre, out of nowhere diversion that doesn't connect to anything, contributing to the very muddled feeling of the ending. His and Jill's love story also doesn't work because McDermott & Travis don't have any chemistry. The pacing is flawed in some places and Travis is the only person who gives a decent performance, but she's the lead so no problem there.

Hardware is something of an oddity. It's a New Wave Science Fiction tale wearing the skin of a bog-standard robot horror movie. But with its delirious colors and sounds and excellent execution, it's a very engrossing oddity. A few missteps hold it back, but it deserves its reputation as a minor classic and it's just too well made to be outright bad. I recommend it to those looking for a weird, deeper than usual sci-fi horror flick. No wonder this got people interested in Richard Stanley. It certainly got mine.

Final score: 4/5